Mandelstam
PJ has more on the word samizdat.
And so Mr. Brown would like to call his book, Samizdat, debasing a word covered with the blood of innocents. Brown has suggested the government "support" what he calls "true" open source code, and establish a government-approved "open source" code bank of some sort, giving money to universities to create it, to replace the free and open source code that thousands of creative volunteers have offered as a gift to the world already, code written by men and women who did it because they felt like expressing themselves, some of them because they wanted software code to be freely available to all, to benefit the world. [...]
It's important to keep clearly before us that software code is speech, a form of expression. Even the law sees it that way. What side would Brown have chosen in Stalinist Russia? I cannot say, but he is attacking an upright man without cause, unless perhaps you count politics or money as a worthy cause, not sending Linus to his death, of course, nothing as dramatic as that. But he does attempt to deface a man's life's work, diminishing his remarkable achievement by falsely implying that it was plagiarism, so as to destroy it and replace it with state-sponsored code, which won't be allowed in business but can be used in universities.
S was reading The Gulag Archipelago a little while ago. I should read it too.
posted Tue 1 Jun 2004 in /issues/adti | link
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